Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

601–610 of 1001 posts

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#601

Post by zahlman »

skhunted wrote: post #491

I’ve been teaching in higher education for 30 years and am soon retiring. I teach math. In every math course there is massive amounts of cheating on everything that is graded that is not proctored in a classroom setting. Locking down browsers and whatnot does not prevent cheating. The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. B…

Absolutely true, and not limited to the USA either.

In university I can recall a computer graphics course where literally everyone got 100+% on problem sets (there were bonus questions of course) and the median score on the midterm was below 50%. Leading up to the exam I remember the prof leading an exam prep session, opening the floor to questions, and getting a sincere request from one of the students to please go over the whole concept of "matrices" again.

This was a 400 level course, BTW. At one of the highest-rated universities in Canada. (I was taking it as an elective from a different program from the default, so I can't speak to the precise prerequisites to get there.)

This was over 20 years ago, BTW. I'm sure it's only gotten somehow even worse.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#602

Post by zahlman »

Akranazon wrote: post #567
bonoboTP wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. In Germany, all exams are like this. Homework assignments are either just a prerequisite for taking exam but the grade is solely from the exam, or you may get some small point bonus for assignments/projects. > But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for…

Germany isn't special, (almost) all exams work like that in the US as well. I don't know why he was implying otherwise. Almost all degrees have required courses in the US as well. You point to a true failure in incentives. And yet, the US has the highest density of renowned universities.

>And yet, the US has the highest density of renowned universities.

The renown has to do with a lot more than demonstrated ability of graduates.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#603

Post by account42 »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #574
bonoboTP wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany, there's no such choice. There are no competing alternative courses that can substitute for each other, the very thought seems rather strange. There is one Linear Algebra course. You have to pass it to get your degree. Typically, it's taught by the same prof for many years, but it might also rotate between different chairs and profs (but only one in each semester and the "design" and requirements of the co…

It seems more strange in my opinion that you'd never have a course thats popular enough that more than one teacher holds sessions for it. You don't have the choice to not take the class, you just have choice with which professor you would like to take it with. And often you would have to get lucky anyway, since that session may be filled so you'd have to take it with the "harder" teacher anyway. For example with the…

Why would a university need multiple professorts seaching the same subject at the same time? A professor isn't a school teacher that needs to look after each student individually. And even for questions andexcercises those are often already handled by teaching assistants of which there can be many as needed.

Having the choice between different professors with supposedly different difficulties for what is supposed to be the same course seems absurd.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#605

Post by Jcampuzano2 »

hnaccount_rng wrote: post #590
Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems more strange in my opinion that you'd never have a course thats popular enough that more than one teacher holds sessions for it. You don't have the choice to not take the class, you just have choice with which professor you would like to take it with. And often you would have to get lucky anyway, since that session may be filled so you'd have to take it with the "harder" teacher anyway. For example with the…

Why would you do that? It doubles the workload for the faculty and gains.. nothing? That's the whole point of a lecture: You have one person teaching many. Beyond very small lectures ( Especially something like Linear Algebra can easily have class sizes of 800+ people at big universities. Yes there is typically exactly one lecture hall for that and you have 30+ exercise groups. But still only one faculty

Sorry I'm not implying I have any practical reason why this is the case. Its just how it was when I was in school.

But I'll say where I went to school, and I hear its even worse now since enrollment in STEM is way up, there were often multiple thousands of students every quarter wanting to take just one class, so they split it up because we simply didn't have lecture halls with enough seats. There would often be 3-4 classes each of 500+ students all full, and still students struggling to get in due to the maximum amount per course. Usually there was around two teachers splitting the sessions, and they also have their other more advanced courses and/or research.

So its probably just practicality in terms of their time and resources. This wasn't an issue with more advanced courses where there was usually only one teacher per semester offering the class.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#606

Post by erikerikson »

ben_w wrote: post #497
erikerikson wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> e/acc types Please expand?

Effective Acceleration, the promotion of rapid AI development and roll out, appealing to all the deaths and suffering that can be prevented if we have the Singularity a year early. Extremely optimistic about the benefits of new tech, downplay all the risks, my experience of self-identifying e/acc people has generally been that they assume AI alignment will happen by default or be solved in the marketplace… and specif…

TYVM. Hopefully the inability to see ways this could go wrong or really look at the problem is sufficiently correlated with the lack of the tools required for progress.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#607

Post by greenavocado »

aftbit wrote: post #599

I haven't seen this discussed as much as I expected - is this even possible? Can a tool be built to - in general - determine if an LLM was used to generate text? Can a human even do it in every case? _Maybe_ you can detect default ChatGPT-3.5 responses. But if a student does a bit of mucking around with fine-tunes on local llama or uses a less-common public model, can you still tell? I have a similar question for AI…

The only way to be sure a student isn't cheating is to search them before they enter a secure room with nothing in it besides the student, the proctor, some paper, maybe some furniture, and proctor-provided pens or pencils to take an oral or written exam. In this age you can only truly judge a student's mind by observing their synthesis skills in-person.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#608

Post by chatmasta »

zahlman wrote: post #601
skhunted wrote: post #491

I’ve been teaching in higher education for 30 years and am soon retiring. I teach math. In every math course there is massive amounts of cheating on everything that is graded that is not proctored in a classroom setting. Locking down browsers and whatnot does not prevent cheating. The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. B…

Absolutely true, and not limited to the USA either. In university I can recall a computer graphics course where literally everyone got 100+% on problem sets (there were bonus questions of course) and the median score on the midterm was below 50%. Leading up to the exam I remember the prof leading an exam prep session, opening the floor to questions, and getting a sincere request from one of the students to please go…

In my algorithms class (and some others), our professor openly approved of collaboration on problem sets. He knew that students were going to collaborate anyway, so it may as well be encouraged and used as a pedagogical tool. The problem sets were more difficult because of this, but nobody was afraid to talk about them and help each other work through the proofs.

The midterm and final exam were in-person in bluebooks, and they were 60% of your grade. If you were just copying the problem sets, you would fail the exams and likely the class.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#609

Post by Jcampuzano2 »

account42 wrote: post #603
Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems more strange in my opinion that you'd never have a course thats popular enough that more than one teacher holds sessions for it. You don't have the choice to not take the class, you just have choice with which professor you would like to take it with. And often you would have to get lucky anyway, since that session may be filled so you'd have to take it with the "harder" teacher anyway. For example with the…

Why would a university need multiple professorts seaching the same subject at the same time? A professor isn't a school teacher that needs to look after each student individually. And even for questions andexcercises those are often already handled by teaching assistants of which there can be many as needed. Having the choice between different professors with supposedly different difficulties for what is supposed to…

As I mentioned in another comment, I don't have any argument as to why. Just how it was when I was in school so thats what I'm used to.

But I also mentioned that there are often thousands of students all trying to take one course. And the schools simply don't have the space to fit all of them in one session since I believe the rules are basically that it needs to be held in a lecture hall big enough to fit every enrolled student, and teachers don't have the time to teach 4 different sessions by themselves on top of their other duties. Maybe class sizes are just smaller elsewhere, but where I went to school it was not unheard of to have multiple thousands of students needing to take one class that was required for practically every STEM major in a given semester.

Post reply on HN